Who are the Obama-Walker voters?

By CHARLES MAHTESIAN

06/06/2012 05:33 PM EDT

One of the more interesting cross-currents in Tuesday’s recall election results was the phenomenon of voters who cast ballots for Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker but plan to vote for President Barack Obama in November.

According to The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, there isn’t much data to understand these 18 percent of Walker supporters. But there is some, and it begins to sketch out a rough profile.

The exit poll — a survey of 2,457 randomly selected recall voters — has barely enough such Walker-Obama to analyze. But some breakdowns are clear: 59 percent are independents, far above the rate in the overall electorate. More than half — 56 percent — described themselves as moderates, again well above the number in the full voter population. Some 52 percent are male; 23 percent are from union households.

Alec MacGillis of The New Republic also takes a shot at defining these voters and begins by asking this question: “Who are these people, who could somehow support both a union-busting darling of the Koch Brothers, as well as the capitalism-hating president?”

He concludes that the Obama-Walker constituency consists of swing voters who found the notion of recalling Walker distasteful and extreme, even if they didn’t necessarily support the governor’s agenda.

“And some of them,” MacGillis writes, “surely, were voters who agreed with Walker on the issue at the heart of this fight—his assault on public employee unions—but do not see this local stance translating into support for the national GOP candidate, Mitt Romney.”

The exit poll data and MacGillis’s take sound about right to me. But my own sense is that there’s a class of swing voters who don’t view Walker’s actions as a specific political assault on public employees, but rather as an aggressive but ultimately understandable effort to rein in spending. Those voters aren’t necessarily hostile to labor — they’re just not sympathetic to public employees at this particular economic moment.

What’s equally interesting here is the fascination over the Obama-Walker voter phenomenon. It says something about our straight-ticket, hyper-partisan era that we view such ticket-splitters as political exotics.